08/09/10

08/04/10

Nature publishes paper on Foldit produced proteins in August 5 2010 issue. The first nature paper where results are produced by game play, and most certainly the Nature's first paper with over 200,000 authors!

07/28/10

06/10/10

Six games produced in the 10-week Games Capstone class make it big in the wild: two independent reviews (1, 2), second best game of the week, and third best game of the month at Kongregate.com, over $3,000 in awards and earnings in first two weeks, and more than 10 web distribution contracts.

03/29/10

Six papers accepted over the weekend: three conditionally accepted to ACM TOG (SIGGRAPH), and three accepted to Foundations of Digital Games.

3/13/08

2/08/08

[see less news]

Zoran joined the CSE faculty in the summer of 1999. He
received a Sc.B. with Honors in Computer Science from Brown University
in 1991, M.S. in Computer Science in 1993 and a Ph.D. in Computer
Science in 1999 from Carnegie
Mellon University. His Ph.D. dissertation research focused on
the automatic synthesis and transformation of realistic character
animation. His thesis also involved numerous performances of embarrassing acts. He has
also held research positions at Sun
Microsystems and Justsystem Pittsburgh Research Center and University of
California at Berkeley. Zoran's research interests
lie primarily in computer graphics, especially in character animation,
motion editing, physically based modeling and modeling/simulation of
natural phenomena. He is also interested in nonlinearly constrained
optimization, motion planning and biomechanics.

"Algorithm discovery by protein folding game players" with Firas Khatib, Seth Cooper, Michael D. Tyka, Kefan Xu, Ilya Makedon, David Baker, and Foldit Players in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America vol. 108 no. 47 18949-18953 (2011) [pdf] [project]

"Reconstructing the World in 3D: Bringing Games with a Purpose Outdoors", with Kathleen Tuite, Noah Snavely, Dun-Yu Hsiao, Adam M. Smith, in International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 2010 [pdf] [project]

"Gameplay Analysis through State Projection", with Erik Andersen, Yun-En Liu, Ethan Apter, François Boucher-Genesse, in International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 2010 [pdf] [project]

Research Projects and Interests

Research in Serious Games.
We are developing new genre of science-centric serious games, including games that lead to
scientific discoveries in biochemistry with implications towards curing
diseases, discovering vaccines, and developing novel biofuels.

Reinforcement Learning for Optimal Learning Pathways.

Methods for Automatic Synthesis of Instructional Content and Leraning Progressions.

Past Research Projects and Interests

Synthesis of Natural Control Mechanisms. We are investigating
automatic methods for determining the fundamental control mechanisms
that give rise to a wide variety of animal locomotion. We are
investigating human locomotion control as well as natural controllers
for quadrupeds and birds in flight.

Dynamics and Control Reduction. We are
investigating control and model reduction techniques that will enable
us to automatically reduce the complexity of dynamic simulators. The
same techniques should also allow for custom-designed
dynamics approximations tailored for specific dynamic control problems.

Reusable
Motion Libraries. Our goal is to give
non-skilled computer users the ability to use computer animation as an
expressive medium. The fundamental paradigm behind our approach
involves the creation of motion libraries which can be easily mapped
onto different characters, or modified to fit the needs of a specific
animation. We model the motion as an optimal dynamic process which
allows us to preserve dynamic properties of the animation during
editing. This formulation also enables us to intuitively edit
high-level motion concepts such as the time and placement of
footprints, length and mass of various extremities or joint arrangement.

Control
of Complex Dynamics. We are developing methods
to control complex dynamic behavior. We are working on
control techniques for natural phenomena such as smoke, water and
cloth, as well as for complex actuated dynamics of animals such as
humans, birds, and various quadrupeds.

High-fidelity
Digital Actors. This research aims at creating
synthetic humans that look and move realistically. We are developing
data driven methods to capture and reuse high-fidelity detailed dynamic
motion of human skin.

Modeling
Dynamic Deformation of Flexible Objects. We
are developing models for interactive manipulation of flexible
articulated body dynamics. The emphasis of this projects are
on realtime performance, dynamic character interaction, and effective
rigging of character dynamics.

Novel
Interfaces for Computer Animation. With the
emergence of real-time motion capture systems we can use our whole body
as a natural interface for describing motion. We are also
exploring traditional drawings as an intuitive interface for rapid
prototyping of computer animations.